There’s Chill Mode for players that just want to build & hang, and Conflict Mode that introduces the Red v. Green factions. Reds sabotage, the terrain slowly turns green as the world gets more terraformed.
Feedback welcome, especially on performance and gameplay!
Important feature request: When I reach the menu, the default action must be "cancel" in case the user is pressing E without reading the messages.
The game is definitely fun but there's some papercuts that make it tough: no dismantle I can find, placement is difficult to understand.
Some feedback:
Colonists are really tough to talk to - you have to be in just the right spot.
There doesn't seem to be a downside to spamming buildings if you can afford it. There needs to be some ongoing cost to everything you place OR a downside.
Music shouldn't change in menus, or at least shouldn't restart constantly. That gets a bit annoying.
I'd say there's a few QoL improvements you could make:
- The building choice for a colonist could probably just be a type of building, otherwise you're scrolling through 90+ buildings
- Add key repeat for scrolling long lists
- Draw a rectangle for the building footprint you're about to build to help position, allow mouse placement to shift it around if you need
- Maybe consider re-selecting the same building type because building an array of buildings requires a lot of keys (or a hotkey per building type?)
- Lists should probably wrap around too
It looks nice, so I hope to give it a try from my laptop. The Mars trilogy was a great read. When I saw the title of this Show HN I said, oh wow!
By the way, dust storms could be a plot device but are they really that bad with so low air pressure?
- I had a really hard time building a greenhouse, because I hadn't realized it'd be bigger than 1 square like all the previous buildings, and it just wouldn't build despite having materials etc. Maybe a footprint outline while hovering a build option?
- There were a lot of instructions from Dr. Kimura right off the bat. Hard for me to remember all that, and I was hoping talking to the doc again would replay those hints.
- My population seems to be stuck at 2.. I have landing pads and habitats and plenty of food etc, but don't really know what I should be doing next.
- that menus continue beyond the first couple lines was not obvious to me. Possibly because I'm on laptop, so the existing hint was way far to the right
The 'mute' button is near the top-right, the leftmost option of the little rectangles ~80% from the top
It's a must-click if you're loading the site with sound - it would be great if OP would add a very obvious volume slider on load
Really like the feel of the game.
FWIW, I have added this to the HN Arcade https://hnarcade.com/games/games/underhill
Did you use any existing stuff like the mars-sim project? https://mars-sim.sourceforge.io/
As in, it needs to go through the whole "What is your name? ____" type of sequence first before any of the WASD/arrow keys actually do anything, even if the instructions earlier on give the impression they should be functional right away.
Also, this would very well fit within fair use
OTOH, if it were merely inspired by it (but not an adaptation) then there would be no copyright issues.
Struggled a little before understanding the instructions.
I would love to play if it would work. And music, thank god for the mute button.
The position yourself, then long press on ‘act’ to build when you can’t see where to put the building anymore is pretty awkward too. I’d expect to click to build, position it, then press confirm or reject or something.
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/ultima-worlds-of-adventur...
Loved seeing things like gift economies, self organization and free association, and a general care for both the people and the planet in those books.
I read this book series as a kid and was enthralled by the sci fi aspects of it. When I reread it as an adult the political undertones completely ruined the series for me.
Anarchism is the politics of ignoring game theory. If you study game theory even a little one of the big lessons is that cooperation at scale is incredibly hard, and that most highly cooperative states are highly unstable. A small number of defectors can easily collapse the whole system back to a more stable tit-for-tat or all-defect state. All-defect states, meanwhile, are often stable.
This probably explains why it took billions of years to get multicellular complex life. It took billions of years for evolution to figure out how to make something that doesn't instantly defect.
It's related to the second law of thermodynamics. An all cooperate state is highly ordered, and thus higher energy and prone to collapsing into a lower energy less ordered state.
A living system that wants to be all-cooperate is going to have to expend huge amounts of energy to maintain that state, which leads me to the final problem with anarchism: most anarchists I've read or met are at least to some degree anti-growth / anti-industry / primitivist types. That math doesn't math. If you want a society where everyone cooperates and is taken care of, that society is going to have huge energy needs, much larger than totalitarian-slum or crime-ridden-hellhole.
I mean, poor people use less energy for starters. Dead people use even less.
The last part is why all the most socially realistic depictions of societies like this are post-scarcity where they've mastered some kind of sci-fi energy source (cheap easy fusion, antimatter, tapping the zero point, etc.). They can create an all-cooperate utopia by using embarrassing amounts of energy to not just police and stamp out defection but render it unnecessary to begin with.
A potential counter to your post would be LeGuin's "The Dispossessed", where a resource-strapped planet-mining society maintains an anarcho-syndicalist society without private ownership, centralised government, or military forces. The likelihood of defection is minimised by firstly the values passed onto younger generations in their education system, and secondly the lack of actual benefit (since few people would follow you and there's not much material wealth or power to gain). Perhaps this is the "other extreme" in which anarchist principles can be explored.
A lot of the anarcho types I’ve met have a blind spot there just like they do with energy. They tend to be social liberals, LGBTQ, etc. and they don’t think about the fact that such societies in real life (not in fiction where the writer is god) tend to be extremely conservative and rigidly traditional. In practice there’s often brutal enforcement too.
The conservatism emerges naturally from the need to strictly maintain the society’s value system to maintain a fragile high cooperation state. Any deviation creates social fragmentation which opens cracks.
I think this is probably why historical civilizations evolved to be so conservative and why social liberalism combined with high trust is a feature of the higher energy industrial cosmopolitan state.
So if you don’t want to live in a strict theocratic state but still want equality, figure out fusion or cheap batteries.
You either overpower entropy with overproduction (cheap energy and cheap stuff) or by finding a cooperative state and then exterminating all deviation from that state with repression and violence.
Paris commune, revolutionary Catalonia and Ukrainian free state also spring to mind, though all were bowled over by neighbouring forces.
These also, as you say, tended to get bowled over eventually.
Try to scale these systems to the whole world and I don't think it would work... not unless you're much closer to post-scarcity.
I never realized that game theory would give me an answer to that question. You can tell that cooperation at scale is really hard just by observing the discourse around climate change and the necessary steps, as it is something that basically involves everyone. Thanks for the hint!
The other way to beat this is to advance renewable or nuclear power or both to the point that these options are cheaper than fossil fuels, which changes the game by making defection much less profitable.
I personally think that's the only way that's likely to work. As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest easiest route to prosperity, even if the rich world makes (and actually keeps) a climate change pact there's going to be an enormous temptation for developing countries to be like "fuck you, we're poor." Poverty, as in real grinding poverty, really really sucks.
Notice several caveats: electricity, not heat; daytime, not nighttime; only for some places on the globe.
Most energy use doesn't use electricity. It's one thing to replace an average-16%-efficient internal combustion engine with electricity and another to replace a 96%-efficient condensing boiler.
The real problem is psychology, not energy. As soon as you get one predatory narcissist/sociopath in a culture, and they're allowed to act freely, they will, with absolute inevitability, take advantage of everyone else's trust and cooperation and destroy any culture of mutual good will.
Energy is irrelevant to this. It will happen at any level of technology.
Yeah, Marx already had these kind of discussions in the 19th century.
It is very interesting that you arrived to similar conclusions while employing a very different methodology.
Marxism evolved out of a criticism of what they call utopian socialism. Marx realized that socialism could only be build upon the massive development of productivity forces that would lead towards a post scarcity society.
Which is also why actually existing socialism struggled so hard. A revolution is more likely to occur in the least developed parts of the world but that also means it will be one of the hardest places to implement socialism in. Especially while having to defend itself against the rest of the world.
Many Marxists didn't even believe it could be possible to build socialism in such a condition but the Soviet Union proved otherwise. It brought many millions of people out of poverty but also had to make some hard and maybe sometimes wrong choices.
The good news is that these days even the least developed parts of the world are vastly more developed than they were in the 19th or 20th century. Modern actually existing socialism will look vastly different. Plus the rot of the latest stage of capitalism is showing more and more.
So socialism might be closer than we might think.
I'd suggest giving https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2130 a read.